Folks!
For those who attended or are following the Delhi Hi-fi meet (Jan 2013) would have seen this product DSPeaker-Anti-Mode 2.0 Dual Core (http://www.dspeaker.com/en/products/20-dual-core.shtml) on demo during the meet. It is small form factor Room EQ + DAC under one roof. During the meet, I argued with and was successful in convincing Ashish Kesarwani of Lakozy to bring the DSPeaker to a standard home environment to demonstrate it's real effectiveness. The following week he came with the DSPeaker, PSB Synchrony One B, NAD C375BEE and NAD DAC-1 to my place for a casual demo session. Given below are my fair and unbaised comments. For this thread, I will only focus on the DSPeaker 2.0.
We started with listening to my existing setup first with my music from the vortexbox without any DAC or Room Correction. Ashish then played some of the music he was familiar with to get an understanding of my setup. We listened to "Jaisalmer by Richard Clayderman & Rahul Sharma", "Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd", "Jai Taal by Zakir Hussain", "What the World Needs Now", "Samba Adagio by Safri Duo". This lasted for about 45 minutes before we decided to make the first change - configure the DSPeaker with Analog In & Out for only Room Correction duties. We can all visit the website and read all about the specifications, so I will not waste time on dwelling on those. The calibration lasted 15 minutes. The graph made on the screen of DSpeaker showed major dips and peaks in the 50 Hz to 100 Hz region. I was already familiar with this phenomena in my room (recall my thread on Low Frequency Measurement). So started the listening of same tracks and switched between bypass and corrected modes to hear the difference...
At this stage, some of us might expect me to write either hugely positive or negative experience, but it was neither. For those who understand high fidelity enough by now, would know that after a certain level of hi fi components, the improvements with further upgrades are subtle but have the potential of taking your experience to a whole new level. My experience was similar. The crisp, fast and punchy notes of Zakir Hussain in "Jai Taal" had an improvement that I had only imagined. In the bypass mode, the mid bass had an annoying, loose, and hanging resonance which was completely hiding the characteristic sound of that tabla note. Since I have played tabla for about a year during school, I can't help but feel sorry when people demand huge bass in the tabla notes. The truth is, the tabla mid-bass is a very complex note which can boom a lot or sound flat due to room interferences or poor quality equipment. The DSPeaker made this sound almost as close to the real thing.
I must admit that during the Delhi meet I thought of this product as one of the "big boys toys", but I have been proven wrong. Yes, the puritans of hi -fi would not want to add electronic room correction into the thousands of dollars worth of equipment. And I don't disagree. If you can have a room which allows your expensive equipment to give the true sound, then by all means avoid a dsp. But in practical situations and for many of us, this could be a useful, "effective" solution. On the other hand, I did not see any major change in the treble and high frequency response. The vocals and mid bass definitely sounded clearer and more detailed due to the complete removal of loose hanging bass from the 50 - 100 hz region. For some the immediate response on hearing the corrected response would be - "where did my bass go". But if you relax for some time and concentrate on enjoying your music, you would hear that actually the bass notes have become much cleaner and flatter. On the negative side, electronic room correction has a big impact on the output level of the source. So the volume on the amplifier had to be increased quite a lot for the same levels of sound.
Next, we connected the laptop to the in-built DAC of the DSPeaker. This has a strange output spec of 24/48, however, the performance and specification are too different things. The in-built DAC in this definitely performs at the same level of various mid-priced DACs in the market. Slightly warmer, but without any loss of top end detail. Before, I heard the DAC performance, I was skeptical about the MRP of Rs.75000/- of this product. But considering that the DAC in-built is definitely up to the level of other 20 - 30 K DACs in the market, you are actually getting a good two-in-one product for the price.